THE nation hopes to shut down all of the country’s notorious online scam centres by the end of next month, the head of the South-East Asian country’s effort to combat the cybercrime said.
Senior Minister Chhay Sinarith, in charge of the Commission for Combating Online Scams, said in an interview that the government, since July, had targeted 250 locations believed to be carrying out the lucrative criminal activity, and had shut down about 80%, or 200, of them.
He said police would carry out suppression activities after April in an attempt to keep the scam centres from reemerging.
Cambodia has launched previous crackdowns against online scam centres but without major effect.
“The real question is whether this effort targets the system that enables the industry, not just the buildings where scams happen,” commented Jacob Sims, an expert on transnational crime.
“Past crackdowns in Cambodia have often left the financial and protection networks intact, allowing operations to quickly reconstitute.
“So far there are few signs the current round of enforcement is reaching the key perpetrators among the Cambodian ruling elite,” said Sims, a visiting fellow at Harvard University’s Asia Center.
“Moreover, continued restrictions on independent reporting and civil society actors make the government’s claims difficult to verify.”
Cybercrime has flourished in South-East Asia, particularly in Cambodia and Myanmar, with scam victims around the world being bilked out of tens of billions of dollars annually, according to United Nations experts and other analysts.
The industry is closely involved in human trafficking, as foreign nationals are employed to run romance and cryptocurrency scams, often after being recruited with false job offers and then forced to work in conditions of near-slavery.
Chhay Sinarith said that in the latest crackdown, the government launched 79 legal cases involving 697 alleged scam ringleaders and their associates.
At the same time, it has repatriated almost 10,000 scam centre workers from 23 countries, he said, with fewer than 1,000 awaiting official repatriation.
Others who have escaped or been released from raided centres have gone home on their own.
Cambodia is working closely with countries, especially China and the United States, to combat the problem, he said.
Cambodian police on Tuesday raided a suspected scam centre in a high-rise building in the capital, Phnom Penh, arresting about 60 Cambodians and Chinese nationals at their desks.
“They did chat to convince people in Europe to invest the money with them, but their investment is fake and fraudulent. It is not real,” said Bun Sosekha, a deputy commissioner of the Phnom Penh Municipal Police.
Earlier Wednesday, journalists were shown equipment confiscated in raids elsewhere, including uniforms and fake identification cards used by scammers to pose online as Japanese police officers to trick and intimidate victims. — AP
